Hello everyone, welcome back to Seeker+, I’m your host Julian Huguet and today we’re
going to take an in-depth look at a concept that’s burst into the forefront of the public’s
consciousness recently, even though it’s been slowly simmering under the surface for
years.
This idea has literally limitless possibilities, for better or for worse.
And depending who you ask it’s either a decade away or it’s already here.
In this series we’re going to explore the metaverse, not literally but conceptually,
obviously.
And we’re going to break it down into three parts: What the metaverse is, what’s required
to build it, and the possible upsides and downsides.
So why has the metaverse become a buzzword all of a sudden?
At the tail end of October 2021 Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, starred in
a video that featured, along with an inexplicably placed bottle of barbecue sauce, an important
announcement for the company.
Facebook was officially changing its name to Meta, a sign of just how much Zuckerberg
has staked the company’s future on the metaverse.
Still I’m probably going to slip and call it Facebook a bunch in this show; anyone remember
when Google rebranded to Alphabet?
Yeah me neither.
Anyway after watching the hour+ presentation I still wasn’t exactly sure I understood
what the metaverse is, or why I’d want to participate in it.
So I did some digging.
And it turns out no one really has a solid definition for what the metaverse is or will
be.
Some commentators say it already exists in a form, while others would argue we’re still
years away from a true metaverse.
It may help to go back to where the term originated, a 1992 sci-fi novel by Neal Stephensen called
Snow Crash.
In the book Stephensen’s characters can enter a shared virtual space that’s a successor
to the internet.
It’s synchronous, so when one user interacts with the world in some way, other users can
see the effects and react in real time, and it’s a persistent -meaning it keeps going
when a user logs off.
Though it’s so immersive, some users never leave.
Users access it through virtual reality goggles and experience it as a gigantic city street.
In the metaverse people can do everything they can in the real world like socialize,
shop, and explore.
There might even be digital doubles of real-world places for them to visit.
The virtual nature of the world opens up more possibilities like floating light shows or
areas where the laws of physics are different or where people can kill each other.
Well not really each other, but each other’s avatars, their digital representations that
can take any form.
The book is also credited with popularizing the term “avatar” but the idea is actually
borrowed from Hinduism where an avatar is the incarnation of a deity in human or animal
form.
A lot of these things are probably ringing a bell for a lot of you listening, especially
if you play video games.
Video games have been bringing people together virtually for decades in a way that more closely
resembles the metaverse than other online media.
Not all video games mind you; video games are after all an enormous amorphous blob of
genres.
Single player games where you have no avatar like tetris bear no resemblance.
Some first person shooters support multiplayer lobbies that can host as many as a hundred
fifty people interacting instantaneously so long as they’re not lagging out and warping
everywhere.
But the world isn’t persistent and maps reset between matches, even if players reduce
them to rubble.
Some games though incorporate so many features of a metaverse the similarities are hard to
unsee.
Some argue that Minecraft should count as a metaverse.
It’s a game people spend hours upon hours in, literally sculpting their own worlds cube
by cube.
If the world is hosted on a public server it can be shared by huge numbers of people,
each one of them capable of contributing to it.
Each world can establish its own rules and players have the freedom to modify the rules
of the game in just about any creative way their technical skill permits.
If users don’t like a certain world they can just take their avatar to another.
Minecraft economies have cropped up organically where players can buy and sell goods with
in-game currency or legal tender.
Another game that’s been pointed to as an existing metaverse is Fortnite.
It had a meteoric rise as a free-to-play battle royale, but it’s grown into so much more.
It’s popularity brought big competing powers together like Microsoft and Sony, allowing
players using hardware from each company to play together and even use characters that
were once exclusive to their games like Kratos from God of War and Master Chief from Halo.
Fortnite’s developer Epic also expanded what players could do with a creative mode
where users could make custom maps and games or even just places to hang out.
Fortnite has hosted concerts from big-name artists like Marshmello with spectacular effects
that are impossible in real life, and over ten million people logged in to watch it live.
That’s right, 10 million people watched a digital dj with a marshmellow for a head
pretending to mix on virtual turntables.
It might be hard to wrap your head around if you didn’t grow up constantly online,
but it’s less about the event and more about the communal experience.
For tons of young people the digital realm of Fortnite is just as much a valid place
to socialize with their friends as any physical space like a mall.
So a lot of ingredients are there, but for a few key reasons some would argue they fall
short of a true metaverse.
For one they’re still experienced the same way we consume most things on the internet:
through a flat screen.
To separate itself from the internet as we know it, users should feel a sense of “presence”,
like they’re actually inhabiting the world.
Zuckerberg is keen on making VR a cornerstone of his vision, which might explain why in
2014 Facebook bought Oculus, an early leader in VR headset hardware.
What we have today also falls short in two other key areas.
One is the limit for concurrent users in a world.
The internet just wasn’t built to support large numbers of people interacting with a
shared world simultaneously.
Servers that could host battle royale games like Fortnite where a hundred people duke
it out simultaneously while speed-building the walled city of Troy only became possible
recently.
10 million people may have watched Marshmellow’s Fortnite concert, but they did it split off
into 100,000 separate shows that took place more or less at the same time.
Server capacities are growing; New World, a game that launched in September 2021, can
host as many as 2,000 players in a single world.
But the imagined metaverse will have no limit to concurrent players.
In it all 10 million concert goers could watch a dj with their avatars shoulder-to-shoulder.
One more thing the metaverse requires is greater interoperability, although exactly how much
no one can agree.
Maybe a person’s avatar can be consistent everywhere they go in the metaverse, maybe
people can use a universal currency to buy anything for sale, or bring items and assets
from one game to another seamlessly.
Today if you play Minecraft you can do basically whatever you want… so long as it’s within
Minecraft.
You could farm 500 million potatoes but you can’t bring them over to Fortnite and start
hucking spuds at Kratos.
You might consider each of these games a metaverse unto themselves, but what many futurists picture
is one massive, all-encompassing online realm.
It’ll even include the internet as we know it today and augmented reality that sits atop
the real world.
Not a metaverse, THE metaverse.
That’s the end goal of companies like Facebook.
I’m sorry, Meta.
I’m never going to get used to that.
How exactly we achieve this immersive unified virtual space is anyone’s guess, and a lot
of big-name players and smaller stakeholders are positioning themselves to shape it.
So let’s talk about what needs to happen for the metaverse to actually get built.
We’ll do that in our next episode.
Thanks for watching, if you like this episode be sure to like and subscribe.
How does the concept of a metaverse strike you?
Could you see yourself living there or would you rather move to a shack in the woods?
Or, ya know, just use the 2d net like you’ve been doing?
Let us know in the comments below, and if there’s other topics you want to see Seeker+
break down let us know there too.
Thanks for watching and I’ll see you for the next episode.